We hope you all are having a fantastic Summer so far, and are getting excited about going back to school if you are a student:). We have a very special update for you today, with a surprise announcement from Dr. Ron. Dr. Ron is excited to announce that as of today he will be coming back to work on FooPets full time! This will help get some kinks worked out and get some new upgrades going for you all. He has many ideas based on your suggestions, as well as some of his own ideas for the future! We cannot wait to see what you think about the changes, so keep those suggestions coming:).

FooCrew Site Status Report

Currently we are beta testing new code for the entire site that will help it run much faster with some new features. Therefore all suggestions are being considered even though you may not get a response in the suggestions forums. As a reminder, please note that the FooCrew makes decisions together and we do not make promises we cannot keep. This means the responses will always seem generic in the suggestion forum; just stay tuned to the next update to find out which ones we took! It also means we do not announce things until they are ready to be launched for the most part, however you should see more updates now that things might be happening quicker than you are used to:).

The Meebo chat replacement tool is still being worked on and we are hoping it will be done soon. We do not have any news on this for now, but we wanted you to know we are still working on it!

FooCrew Suggestions Procedures Reminder (re-post)

We have had a lot of members asking for updates and announcements lately, so we thought we would break down the procedures we use so that you understand we are not ignoring you. We love our members and your suggestions, we are just somewhat limited in how we respond sometimes and we wanted you to know why. This is the way it works:

FooCrew may or may not decide that we agree with the members suggestions. If the FooCrew decides a feature should be brought back, it then moves to the list of things to be done. Since our engineers never know what hiccups they will run into, we never announce things until they are done for the most part. The Meebo chat replacement was announced because we wanted you guys to know that we cared about replacing this feature for you based on the outcome of the survey, but most of the time you will not see announcements until we are ready to release things:). The engineers cannot even give us times most of the time, therefore we cannot give you ETA’s either. We are here and we are listening, we just don’t announce things and get you guys excited until we are close to going live or live already. We wanted you to know why we cannot give you timelines or sometimes even announce things(as they may not be do-able), we hope this helps you understand that we are not ignoring your requests for public updates.

FooMart Special Announcement

Back to School Mart Fun!

On the last Friday of August we will be celebrating back to school in the Mart with special deals from FooPets!! Be sure to keep a watchful eye out the entire day for these special items. They will be limited release so don’t miss out on the fun!

Please know that 90% of what we do with our thin crew is just keeping the site running, this means that upgrades will continue to come slowly but we are working just as fast as we can. We hope you are having a great year so far, and as always thanks for playing!

**Special Announcements**Random Stat Pet ReleaseOur special events over the Holidays last year included the release of several special stat pets! Your FooAmbassadors will be announcing contests to continue this, and they will come out of the Adoption Center so that everyone has a chance to adopt them. We hope you liked these contests, because the FooAmbassadors work so hard on them:). Increase in Prize AmountsThe prizes being offered for contests will be increasing! Be sure to watch the contest forums for other fun contests and prizes hosted by your FooAmbassadors!

FooMart Update

Stay tuned for some exciting things in the FooMart coming soon! A special thanks to all of our members who have submitted items and backgrounds to the mart, we have really enjoyed working with them and we cannot wait to see what you come up with this Summer.

FooCrew Site Status Report

We are still working on the new chat tool as you all know, we do not have any time frame expectations we want to announce as of now due to the challenges in implementing this new system. Thanks for your patience with this, we will keep you updated on our progress!

There are two situations we would like to address for you all to pay special attention to an the first one is flagging. We have had multiple reports of the flagging system being abused. This is a friendly reminder to follow the rules of the site, and that means do not abuse the flagging system. As with anything, think about how this effects your fellow members and how it would affect you if you were on the other end. Let’s come up with ways to have fun with each other, instead of thinking of ways to irritate one another and I bet we will all have more fun!

The other issue we wanted to talk to you about is pet limits. In the past the limit has been 50 pets per account. We have had several members reporting random glitches happening all over the site for them when they are logged onto these accounts with 50+ pets. These glitches are absolutely because they are way over the pet limit. We want to remind you all that being over the limit affects everyone, because when you do things it causes the site to move very slowly due to the amount of pets you have it is placing a lot of demands on our servers. Now imagine thousands of users pulling on our servers for data like that, and you will understand why the frequent issues with slowness occur. Dr. Ron advises having less than ten pets for optimal fast site performance, as the accounts were never intended to hold more than 50 pets and we now have many users over that limit by a long shot. We will not be implementing restrictions on pet limits (at this time), just know that if you are over the limit you are not going to have an optimal playing experience and it will affect your fellow members. If the pet limits continue to cause problems, we may move to a rule change on this pending member input. This would only be to allow for site efficiency for everyone; and therefore the pet limit rules could change at that time. If we do need to have a discussion about this; then at that time we will put a survey out and get your responses on this topic:).

As always, please know that 90% of what we do with our thin crew is just keeping the site running, this means that upgrades will continue to come slowly but we are working just as fast as we can. We hope you are having a great start to your Summer Holiday so far, and as always thanks for playing!

We hope you all had a very nice time with your families over Thanksgiving. As some of you may already know; Thanksgiving was an eventful time for us! Recently we had a FooDollar flash sale and we had a special visitor to the site as most of you know. This person added some pets with some not very nice names to Dr. Ron’s account. Thankfully, our members let our Ambassadors know right away and we were able to keep it under control until the glitch was fixed. We appreciate your help in making sure our site stays fun and safe for everyone, so thank you very much for everyone who helped us with this and contacted us. That being said; this is the season of giving gifts and love to our families and the FooCrew has thought of some very special ways to surprise you this Holiday Season and we certainly hope you like it!

Dr. Ron Pet Release

Dr. Ron has so many pets and he has a lot of work to do on the site! He has decided he will be selling some of them randomly back to the Adoption Center to give our members the chance to own them and help take care of them:). Be watching for those pets, we will do our best to be fair to all time zones so that our members around the world will have an equal opportunity to adopt them!

Random Stat Pet Release

Our special events for December will include the release of several special stat pets! This will be done randomly throughout the month, and they will come out of the Adoption Center so that everyone has a chance to adopt them. Don’t miss our Holiday Winter Blast coming soon, so watch the contest forums and stay tuned for other fun contests and prizes hosted by your FooAmbassadors!

FooMart Update

We hope that you all have enjoyed all the holiday items and backgrounds that have been released over the last few weeks as well as the RARE re-releases of older items on Black Friday! You never know what RARE re-release will come out in the future so keep checking. Also, be sure to keep your eyes open for some special surprise backgrounds in the near future that we hope you all will really enjoy!

A special thanks to all of our members who have submitted items and backgrounds to the mart, we have really enjoyed working with them.

FooCrew Site Status Report

We are happy to announce the Sunday Slowdown seems to be fixed! The dynamic items(youtube player, etc) are still having issues with the scenes and we have had some issues with the decorator not saving scenes so we have been looking into that still. Thanks for your patience with this, we will keep you updated on our progress!

Please know that 90% of what we do with our thin crew is just keeping the site running, this means that upgrades will continue to come slowly but we are working just as fast as we can. We hope you are having a great Holiday Season so far, and as always thanks for playing!

We have had a lot of members asking for updates and announcements lately, so we thought we would break down the procedures we use so that you understand we are not ignoring you. We love our members and their suggestions, we are just somewhat limited in how we respond sometimes and we wanted you to know why. This is the way it works:

FooCrew may or may not decide that we agree with the members suggestions. If the FooCrew decides a feature should be brought back, it then moves to the list of things to be done. Since our engineers never know what hiccups they will run into, we never announce things until they are done for the most part. The Meebo replacement was announced because we wanted you guys to know that we cared about replacing this feature for you based on the outcome of the survey, but most of the time you will not see announcements until we are ready to release things:). The engineers cannot even give us times most of the time, therefore we cannot give you ETA’s either. We are here and we are listening, we just don’t announce things and get you guys excited until we are close to going live or live already. We wanted you to know why we cannot give you timelines or sometimes even announce things(as they may not be do-able), we hope this helps you understand that we are not ignoring your requests for public updates.

FooCrew Site Status Report

As far as an update, we are still working on the Meebo replacement tool for you and we hope to have that done soon and we are not sure how much longer it will take. When we took over the site we promised to focus on the following: 1) keeping site performance fast, 2) fixing bugs that frustrate you, and 3) ensuring that FooPets continues to be a sustainable business. This means that we are spending most of our time keeping the site running, and since Sundays have proven to be an issue we are now focusing on fixing that in addition to replacing Meebo as our top priorities, so we really appreciate your patience! Some things you can do to help (temporarily until this is fixed), is play later in the day on Sundays if you can so that you don’t get frustrated and so that there are less players pulling from the servers. This will help the players that need to feed their pets do so a little faster, at least for now:).

The ledger delays seem to be getting much better, unless you guys are not reporting them we have not seen near the problems that we did. The following are still on our list of things to look at:

Things are going well in the FooMart! We have a special announcement from our FooMart Manager about items that are being used on other sites. FooPets always checks for copyrights before adding images to the FooMart. If it passes copyright checks, we then will consider the item. If that item is being used on other sites, regardless of whether it is copyrighted we will most likely skip over these items because we prefer artwork that is currently not being used on other sites. This means if you have submitted artwork to several sites, FooPets may ignore that piece of art just to be safe as we are not sure of the agreements members have made with other sites as far as rights of use. We have been testing pricing still and items to see what you guys want more of and what you do not like, so thank you for your voicing your consumer preferences through your purchases (This is how many real world economies work as well, if stores cannot sell something they will discontinue it so you have this consumer power in the real world as well). We are keeping track of popular items and non-popular items so we appreciate your participation in the FooMart and we are glad you are enjoying have user submitted art back in place.

Very Important Rule Change: Zero Tolerance for Bullying

We have had some issues with bullying and antagonizing in the forums. This was already against the rules and it has become an even greater issue in the forums lately. Please remember that this is very much against the rules of our site and against the law in some areas. Bullying and ganging up on others is a very real problem not just in our forums but also in the real world, so lets do our best to help each other avoid this. Sometimes you do not realize you are coming off as a bully, so be very careful as our ambassadors are being told to have zero tolerance for this type of activity. There are laws going up all over the world about this, for resources on your state laws in the US you can visit http://www.stopbullying.gov

For the intents of FooPets and our site, we are adopting the following definition as stated by the US Government: Bullying is unwanted aggressive behavior that involves real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated over time. Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose. The following are also listed as forms of bullying: teasing, name calling, inappropriate sexual comments, taunting, threatening to cause harm, leaving someone out of a group on purpose, telling children not to be friends with someone, spreading rumors, embarrassing someone in a public forum, among other things. Please note the updated section 12 of our current Rules of Conduct:

12. Zero Tolerance Policy

Immediate suspensions from the forum can result from any of the following: bullying, posting of images, text, or links that are obscene, harmful, threatening, abusive, hateful, and/or offensive.
This also includes presenting FAKE or FABRICATED screenshots, online or in support.

Please know that 90% of what we do with our thin crew is just keeping the site running, this means that upgrades will continue to come slowly but we are working just as fast as we can. We hope you are having a great year so far, and as always thanks for playing!

I hope you all are liking the changes we have been working so hard on! A year ago, we took over the site and told you our focus was on the following: 1) keeping site performance fast, 2) fixing bugs that frustrate you, and 3) ensuring that FooPets continues to be a sustainable business.

So far we have fixed many bugs, however there is still a lot of work to be done and we continue to look into these issues.

During the past year we have had a lot going on, we have had glitches with the forums, instacare, gifting, dog walking, bonding badge glitches just to name a few. Some of the highlights were getting instacare fixed, bringing back User Submitted Art in November (which has kept us very busy since), lowering the FooTax, and the FooKennel. Most of these are now resolved and things are working much better in general, however we are still working on the following issues:

Ledger delays

FooStudio/Decorator/FooFoto issues

Arcade

Friends list/Meebo issue

We are happy to announce that user submitted art in the FooMart is going well! Please remember to not submit items that you do not own or that have copyrights to the mart so that we can make sure that user submitted art stays. We do have some members who continue to send in copyrighted items, please be warned that individual members can be blocked from submitting art, we want you to know that you can lose this privilege so be careful and responsible and make sure you are not stealing someone else’s creative work. This has kept us very busy, we have spent the past several months testing the mart and checking out new ways to release items. Because of this, we do have some great news for you:).

We are bringing on a FooMart Manager! Parrotlady will still be an Ambassador however in addition to that role, she has accepted a paid position with the FooCrew where she will be helping us in the mart. This will allow us to get back to serving our membership and looking into issues. She has helped us tremendously during these rough times, as all the FooAmbassadors have and we are so very grateful for them. I hope you guys know how special these ladies are and how hard they work to keep this site safe and friendly for children and adults both, this is a very tough job as I am sure you can imagine! As a reminder, please do not contact us regarding your art submission this helps us to have more time to release things as requested already when you submit art at http://www.foopets.com/art. If your artwork is chosen for the FooMart, you will be awarded 100 FooDollars. This means it was accepted, if you do not see your item then it has not been released yet:).

Please know that 90% of what we do with our thin crew is just keeping the site running, this means that upgrades will continue to come slowly but we are working just as fast as we can. We hope you are having a great year so far, and as always thanks for playing!

We know you have been patiently waiting to hear the big news, and we are so sorry about the delay. We ran into some glitches on the admin side of the mart that are now resolved. We won’t keep you in suspense:

USER SUBMITTED ART IS BACK!!!

If you would like to submit art, please go to http://www.foopets.com/art and make sure you are following the guidelines or your art may be rejected:). As you all know we do not have an artist on staff yet, so this is the next best thing until then!

Now here is a recap of where we are with things:

-Instacare All is finally fixed thanks to our diligent engineers who worked tirelessly to get this fixed, this took a long time and we know you guys were really patient so thank you to all of you! We have seen some instances where FooBabies who are not bonded are showing red bars as well as FooPets who need Flea Treatments so please make sure neither of these is the case if your instacare all is not working and please let us know in support if you have troubles.

-FooMart is fixed

-Kennel Issues – were related to instacare all issues and seem to be fixed as well

-Recent Forums Post Button – was turned back on yesterday due to popular demand

-Things we are still working on (See August FooNews for details)

Ledger Issues

FooStudio/Decorator/FooFoto issues

Arcade

Friends list/Meebo issues

Play page error codes

Conception acceleration issues

The last two months have been very busy, but very positive for our FooCommunity. We have had lots of new members, and our members on the East Coast survived the big storm as far as we know; however everyone please keep those still without power in your thoughts. We had some major server issues on the East Coast due to the storm and we want to thank you all for your patience while we were doing the best we could to keep things running smoothly!

Google Chrome has been the recommended browser for FooPets for a long time, with that being said we are still saying this is the best browser, however when the new update came out we are hearing of some issues so hang in there or try another browser if you have troubles. We are hoping Google will release a patch for whatever is causing these issues very soon. As always, clearing your cache and history regularly will help:). Adobe Flash also released an update recently, so be sure you are updating that as well if you are having issues with your browser(Google Chrome updates this automatically when you update Chrome).

We are still hearing complaints of flagging being abused, just a reminder to make sure you are using that appropriately.

We also have had high demand for an adult only forum lately, we want you to know we welcome members of all ages here in our FooCommunity however having all ages makes it challenging to keep things child appropriate. We hear you when you ask for an adult only forum, however at this time that is considered a feature request and we will not look into this until the issues are fixed. We are not saying yes, we are not saying no, but we are saying not now:). Hope that helps clear things up at least for now!

Now, questions have been asked as to where we are heading and what our goals are as far as FooPets Management. For right now, our goals are to fix the site and all the glitches as they have been since March. We are not focusing on Facebook applications or mobile sites until this site is up and running very smoothly. At that time we will regroup and discuss what our members want and how we can best fulfill those needs. Our goal is to be here for you guys, to listen, to react, and to provide a better place for all – children and adults alike! If we start focusing on where we are going before we fix the site, we would be essentially building our house on the sand instead of a solid foundation. That being said, please keep your suggestions coming in the forums and know that we are taking notes and making lists for when that day comes. For now though, as we have stated before, feature requests and upgrades will remain a list until we can get things fixed and running smoothly. We have also learned it is not a good idea to announce changes – until those changes are ready to be released as you can all agree with I am sure:). Again, thank you for your patience for this big news and rest assured we will always be listening and working hard to make this a great place for all our members!

Have a great weekend everyone, we cannot wait to see your art and get some new things in the mart!

Well it is back to school for some of you, we hope you are off to a good school year! We have made some pretty big changes at FooPets this month, two big changes by popular demand:

Opened up the Mart

Lowered the FooTax to 25%

Initially, some helpful reminders especially with all the changes. Please remember to clear your cache and history regularly, as FooPets has heavy graphic content this becomes really important so if you are having issues make sure you try this first. Also, Google Chrome remains as the best browser to use with FooPets because it automatically updates your Adobe Flash when it updates.

Just now, Dr. Ron has posted the new Rules of Conduct so be sure you review those! The biggest change will be the pet limit, you are now only allowed to trade for up to 10,000 FooDollar resale. The reason for this is that some members were abusing the site to obtain FooDollars to obtain their dream pet because of the prices skyrocketing so we are hoping this cuts down on the abuse of the site to obtain their dream pet. This will also put dream pets into the realm of possibility for those who may not otherwise have a chance at buying their pets. So if you are trading for more than 10,000 FD resale, you will get two warnings before your social features are suspended for a period of time.

Offensive language, you will only get one warning for this so be careful and watch what you say:). Please remember we are not out to get anyone you guys, we only want to keep the site safe for children.

On to more exciting news! The FooDollar glitch we were concerned about is now fixed thanks to our wonderful engineers. If you are doing a trade and it sounds too good to be true, please double check with support on duplicate item trades especially if those items have purchase limits we are still investigating the abuse of this glitch but you should be able to resume normally unless it seems wrong, go with your gut and double check with support in that case.

Also, as of today FooAmbassadors will consider resetting flags on posts for you on a case by case basis. This is due to popular demand because we have some flagging fairies out there harassing some members. If you are in a situation where you need to edit your post in the forums, please contact an Ambassador. They are very busy and will consider it, it is entirely up to them which ones they would like to help with. Please do not abuse this privilege and only contact them if necessary. Please remember to flag appropriately, this is against the rules and we have our ways of finding out who is doing it. Your current list of Ambassadors are: